Modern personal and commercial transportation vehicles have become increasingly accessible over the years. With more people owning and/or operating vehicles such as commercial and/or personal aircraft, there has been an appreciable increase in the required maintenance or repair of said vehicles. With respect to vehicles such as aircraft with geared legs supported by wheels, occasionally it may be required to lift the vehicle to attend to a repair, undertake maintenance or otherwise visually inspect the same.
Previous approaches to lifting vehicles of this nature such as the popular Cessna® line of aircraft with three-wheeled tail dragging landing gear configuration, for example, include providing a singular, tapered cradle that slides up the aircraft's flat style landing gear at the base. In other words, the single tapered cradle is positioned low and adjacent or nearby the associated gear wheel. A user may lift this aircraft by positioning a hydraulic lift such as a conventional bottle jack underneath the single tapered cradle and then engaging the cradle with a single gear leg of the aircraft. As a result, only one gear leg of the aircraft is capable of being lifted at a time.
In practice, as said single tapered cradle lifts the corresponding gear leg of the aircraft, the center of lift of the aircraft has tends to shift inboard about the center wheel of the aircraft. This unfortunately causes the aircraft to become unstable and therefore dangerous to both the user and unnecessarily risks harm to the aircraft itself.
Accordingly, there exists a need for an approach to lifting vehicles such as aircrafts in a safe and secure manner to protect from operator injury and harm to the vehicle itself. There also exists a need to safely and effectively lift vehicles by utilizing currently known tools such as conventional hydraulic lift mechanisms in order to conserve overall costs to operators. There also exists a need to provide a tool that safely and effectively lifts multiple sized vehicles so that operators are not required to purchase many individual tools for different types of vehicles and instead can adjust a single tool to be used between different sized vehicles as well as be operable for use with existing hydraulic lift mechanisms. The presently disclosed embodiments address these and other needs in the art.